Ubisoft exploited cheap labour for SH4 and SH5 by doing the development in Romania and got pretty much a cheap quality product out the door. Ubisoft Romania eventually got itself into producing more high quality software later on (Assasins Creed) but those early projects didnt go well for them.

A sim game requires a whole bunch of subject matter expertise, research and functionally involved coding. As opposed to a shooter which has wider appeal and more straightforward environments and objects.

What tends to happen is smaller studios decide to take the risk on, and appeal to things like the greater shelf life of a sim game as opposed to the often rapid loss of interest with this weeks current shooter game in a way to get a publisher. Usually the publisher screw them over on dates, and the smaller studio wanting to establish itself accepts unrealistic publisher terms.

So increasing you find titles like SH5 and IL2 Cliffs of Dover failing miserably with unstable and buggy outcomes.

I dont mind the freemium model and I dont mind spending here and there on my gaming....Each of my graphics cards was over a thousand dollars....As opposed to other hobbies one might do like motorsport or sailing yachts this is pretty cheap.

My concern isnt the fremium model, its the loss of high quality, robust and detailed simulation games.

They also made SHIII in Romania.

SHO :up:

-I think we can only welcome it. I'm not saying it will be a better sim than the silent hunter series we got already, but it will be a better game and it will evolve. 2d will become 3d in time.

-I think there is a way bigger market for it than the games we got at the moment. Which is great because than submarine games will be more popular.

-Support for SHO will be very good I expect.

Has there been an increase of sales and interest in Steel Beasts in the wake of World of Tanks? Moreover, unlike WoT, SHO is a brower game. I wouldn't count on it becoming SH3/4/5 online. All of this, combined with the now poor reputation of the series, doesn't add up to a financial success to in my view.

Want to see just how ashamed Ubi is of Silent Hunter 5? Go to ubi's website and try to find Silent Hunter V in their little scrollable windows for games. You can't find it! Silent Hunter III and IV is there though. You have to dig really deep to find any mention of Silent Hunter V.

Pretty much how I feel about SHO, with one added reason. Being an online only title, there's going to be a problem:

Ubisoft's QA sucks.

Unlike SH3, SH4, and SH5, there will be no way for the player community to fix or find work arounds for the many bugs and broken features that Ubisoft will inevitably leave in the game after they abandon it for other projects.

The fact that it's an online only title....

That is annoying. Ubi doesn't care anymore. It's as simple as that for me.

Edit (so it's better understandable) It's a 'free' online game it's almost certainly going to be succesfull. Even we can try it at no cost at all. Reputation within a relatively small group of people doesn't matter at all, because Ubi is targetting a way larger market than the subsim community.

i think the opposite is true

in a small community reputation is everything.

the problem here is that ubi is trying to make a subsim that is naturally a niche market into a non-niche market... in other words, generally a small group have loved and nurtured the series. now they want to make it available to everyone and try to get everyone to love it and nuture it.

when they dont love it... and it loses money and gets bad reviews or a poor reception the subsim genre will probably become a "leper" genre that developers shy away from in the future.

which leaves us with no new game titles for years and years

Im here to tell you this free to play, pay to win / browser game mash up is not going to pair well with a subsim.

but thats just my opinion talking

The reputation absolutely does matter, especially once you stick the Silent Hunter intellectual property label on it. And a P2W game is absolutely not free.

He means that the small hardcore community isn't the sole audience for this kind of game, so whether or not subsim posters hate the game has little effect on things. The majority of players never visit the forums to begin with...

In the modern world of the internet, reviews of previous titles are only a Google search away. It will take virtually no effort to see what people think of the series. And any kind of tolerance will last as long as it takes for people to realize that it costs $1.50 US to avoid the mandatory cooldown period.

But ubi cant do it without the subsim.com community because what we say will matter. if we all hate the game thats ALOT of people saying it is garbage. why did they invite onkel neal down and give his thoughts? Ubi is targeting a larger community you are right there but how many of that outer target will stick with the game? probably not alot because they don't have the patience for the genre.

They already are doing it without this community's blessing. They're not counting on us, they are counting on a WoT style cash-in. The problem is that SHO will almost certainly be nowhere as good as WoT.

If you ever bothered to look on the games facebook page, for instance, the majority of comments there seem to be in the positive, with the exception of the very early once around the time the game was revealed.